Bobby Frank Cherry, 74, Klansman in Bombing, Dies

Bobby Frank Cherry, the former Klansman whose conviction two years ago for the church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 resolved one of the most shocking cases of the civil rights era, died yesterday at the Kilby Correctional Facility near Montgomery, Ala., a prison spokesman said. He was 74.

The cause was cancer, the spokesman, Brian Corbett, said. Mr. Cherry was serving a life sentence.

The Sept. 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, a gathering place for civil rights demonstrators, became a galvanizing moment in the civil rights movement, though hardly in the way that Mr. Cherry and his accomplices expected.

The bombing occurred just days after the court-ordered desegregation of Birmingham's schools, and the brutality of the girls' deaths in the church basement horrified many white Southerners and eased the way for change in the coming decades, civil rights experts have said.

Early on, Mr. Cherry, a white supremacist who was a demolitions expert, was suspected but not charged in the bombing. Two other men were convicted for their roles: Robert Chambliss was convicted in 1977 and died in prison, and Thomas E. Blanton Jr., in 1997.

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Bobby Frank Cherry was born on June 20, 1930. As a young man, he joined the Marines, where he learned about demolitions.

In the 1950's and 1960's, as the civil rights movement gained traction in the South, he became part of a small, violent core of white supremacists, prosecutors said.

In 1957, he was part of a mob that attacked a black minister who had been trying to integrate a Birmingham school.

At his 2002 trial, prosecutors said he used a set of brass knuckles on the minister, but he was not charged for it as the statute of limitations had expired. A few years later, they said, Mr. Cherry pistol-whipped a black man who insulted him at a restaurant.

In 1964, the F.B.I. recorded a conversation between Mr. Cherry and his wife at the time, Jean, in which he told her "we were making the bomb" the Friday before the bombing. He moved to Texas in the years following the bombing.

All along, Mr. Cherry maintained that he was the target of a campaign of lies. He often called himself a "political prisoner," according to published accounts, and complained in prison that he was ill and not receiving proper treatment.

In October, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously denied his appeal.

In addition to his son, Mr. Cherry is survived by his second wife, Myrtle, and a daughter, Karen Sunderland.

Correction: November 20, 2004, Saturday An obituary yesterday about Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Klansman who was convicted in the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Ala., referred incorrectly in some copies to the historic event that preceded the crime. The bombing occurred days after Birmingham schools underwent court-ordered desegregation -- not segregation.